Cancelled!

The Africa Centers for Disease Control announced today that the randomized control study of the Hepatitis B vaccine by the two “researchers” in Guinea-Bissau has been cancelled on the basis that vaccines known to prevent disease were going to be withheld from children in an area with a known high incidence of the disease.

“The good guys won,” Paul Offit, an infectious diseases physician at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia told The Guardian. “This administration did not see people in Africa as valuable. You can’t treat children like this, you can’t treat people like this. We were able to stand up for them. We were able to convince people about the fact that this was unethical.”

The study of the Hepatitis B vaccine in Africa has been compared to the infamous syphilis study in Tuskegee, Alabama, when treatment with antibiotics was withheld from study subjects after it became known that the treatment cured the disease. The study involved poor, uneducated men and went on for 40 years before a whistleblower exposed the terrible and hugely unethical study in 1972.

In other news, a federal judge in Minnesota ordered ICE agents not to use pepper spray and other “crowd dispersal tools” against peaceful protesters in Minneapolis and ordered that people in cars following agents in ICE cars and SUVs could not be stopped or detained unless they were “forcibly obstructing or interfering with” agents. The ruling came in a lawsuit filed by six Minneapolis citizens who said that their constitutional rights had been violated by ICE agents.

A cloud has partially lifted. Yaaaaaay!